


Looking Sharp

by pettiot



Series: Mod-Urban Thedas AU [3]
Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age Inquisition - Fandom
Genre: Class Issues, Clothing, F/M, Gender Issues, fleeting lovers, idolisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:08:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23138992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Fresh across the border, Bull and Krem hide in a Hightown mansion gone to ruin.
Relationships: Krem/f!Hawke
Series: Mod-Urban Thedas AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634659





	Looking Sharp

When we got there, the elevator hadn’t worked for years. It looked as if someone had been occupying it until they got worried about the cables holding it between floors - three of which were above ground and Maker knew how many below. One of the first things Bull and I did was pull it down, board up the floor at the mansion's basement level. The entryways lower down, into the tunnels that used to be Kirkwall's limestone mines, used to haunt my dreams. Gaping, ugly little wounds, catwalks crossing into the chalk-smelling darkness.

And that was what the place was like: tiles that were once beautiful, now chipped and covered with grime that made it impossible to guess the original colour. Horrors beneath, veneer above. Wooden beams sagging threateningly. A courtyard – tennis? Basketball? A frivolity of space? – cracks all over. 

“Home sweet home,” said Bull one night, when we were still in the process of shoring up the windows. “It has character.”

There were times I found him smoothing the grime away from the tiles, contemplating so deeply with his one eye, and I wondered if he was thinking about beauty, and glory, and owning, all those things that were so Tevinter and so far away from where he had been born and trained and sacrificed. He’d taken that wound over his eye for me, but all the other pieces of his flesh had been offered up for the Qun.

“It’s not like anyplace else,” which was as close to agreeing with him as I could bring myself to get.

He was optimistic that the invasion would somehow pass us over. Kirkwall had been the start of it, was his theory, no one was paying it that much attention any more. It drove me nuts. Sometimes the jets flew overhead so close they set off the building’s fire alarm, for no discernible reason – we certainly weren’t close enough for smoke. To compensate, the alarm failed to sound for the one fire started through a lightning strike.

The ceilings leaked, of course. The house breathed in storms; rain in, rain out, electricity skating across puddle livened to death traps.

Into this house walked Marian Hawke. I can’t remember when, but I remember that first sight: a study in black and creaking leather and feathers, a bloody nose and a razor-edge haircut that may as well have been a badge that read _queer_ , so powerfully out of context in this fucked up post invasion world. About thirty full seconds I stared at her that first day, legs akimbo across a great crack in that courtyard, chin lifted as if she’d take on Bull herself as they interrogated each other.

Turned out it’d once been her house, or at least her family’s house. 

Everything about her called attention to what she was. That fucking staff. The static that crackled through the feathers at her shoulders. The flat-bound chest and the hips she had no interest in hiding. _It’s your book, your Qun; you burn for it. Not me._ She was nothing like a magister, but also nothing like I could imagine a woman could be, and still want to be a woman.

She terrified me.

Why Bull let her stay, I didn’t really consider. It wasn’t his Qun any more either, I suppose, and if there’s one thing that did attract him it was power, either being near it or being able to demonstrate it, and for such a big guy it was the power in knowledge that really got him hungering. Marian _knew_ something about what had happened here those scant few years ago, with the Arishok. Knew and wouldn’t tell, at least not the likes of me. 

There were stories, of course. She couldn’t walk the streets in Kirkwall without a bottle being chucked at her. Sometimes worse. All that would end when the Qun came back and imposed order.

She also knew all the secrets of the house, and found me when I wanted to be as far away as I could get from all of this.

The truth: we should have been mutually irrelevant to each other. She’d been close to something big and lost something that shouldn’t be lost. I’d been a grunt, slugging away in my milquetoast mediocrity, conscripted to the Tevinter forces on my nineteenth birthday the way all young citizens of the Imperium were when they couldn’t pay their way out of it. Terrified of being sent to the war on Seheron, terrified of being called out for the way the military-issue bras physically disgusted me, the military-issue skirts and their stupid under-pantaloons, the limited range of five possible haircuts women were permitted to get and had to sport if they were going to get their weekly ration. The whole fucking enterprise felt crafted to humiliate specifically me, and how no one else thought – or at least, dared to say – that the Tevinter soporati were forced to emulate through their sameness exactly what they were trying to destroy in the Qunari’s faceless nameless troops, our fodder and beds and healthcare dependent on moving, thinking, fighting in unison without a sliver of individuality, and that the altus families in their wealth and glory and silk and robes could only benefit from our spilled blood one way or the other—

We should have been mutually irrelevant to each other, but I lusted for her, a mix of terror and pride and envy, and Marian lusted for being wanted, and she wanted to _show me_.

The day we first fucked, I was wearing a flannel shirt, sleeves ripped off, a zipped up jacket, loose faded jeans, my best attempt at hiding what lay beneath and signalling something else; she got beneath damned quick enough, this local anti-celebrity. Pulled my hair by accident thanks to the knots, which made me shockingly sick and realise exactly how much I hated it, how much I needed to rip this stupid overgrown bob out from the roots. We talked about old movies we remembered, not many shared between Tevinter and Orlais-aligned nations, but enough filtering through these Free Marches that we could find a commonality: a mutual love of cuttingly crisp suits. I can still taste her, thinking about it, a pained throb deep in my gut to remember how much I wanted her. 

She taught me how to dress. Cut my hair exactly how I wanted it, which was just like hers. I learned how Maker-damned sharp she could keep her own. A sister once trained as a hairdresser who had practiced with her. The sister long dead, during a pandemic. Taught her on a brother who had left, almost as long ago. Marian dismissed the losses with ease and I didn’t think about it then: couldn’t remember how it felt to hurt for family. We must have looked so easy to judge, in our matching haircuts.

She taught me how to dress.

“I don’t know what to call this,” I admitted to her once, a hand on her soft breast while I couldn’t ever let her touch mine. 

“Nothing.”

I couldn’t hide the hurt, so she laughed, kissed me, held me hard—

“Not like that,” she said. “Not nothing-nothing. But when the Qun gets here, they’ve got enough labels to go around, let’s spare ourselves for now. Hope the one for what you are doesn’t fit as harshly as the collar will for me.”

She grew plants in the cracks in the courtyards and ruthlessly destroyed all cockroaches that dared to enter, magic crackling with glee. 

"You're never afraid of it," she accused me once.

"Of what? Your magic?"

"It must be everywhere in Tevinter."

"I'm fucking terrified of magic." I kissed her fingers in apology. "Probably not in the same way people are here."

"And what way is that?"

"Like people who've never seen an altus shit himself at the sight of a Qunari saarabas."

Like people who'd never seen an altus turned into a Qunari saarabas, I couldn't quite tell her.

"Can you just call me Hawke," she asked one day. "Marian is a name for a lady."

"Only if you call me your fine young man."

"Oh, Kremisius," she trilled, "so forward--!"

That same one day, a ragged man arrived, scarecrow thin and hunched; missing an arm. He had a hacked off beard level with his chin and a receding hairline and dirty hair shocked through with white, like lightning, a coat tied together with strips of cloth. He looked lost, not like he was looking for her, but when he saw her, he straightened and looked like someone completely different.

It was a long time before I could appreciate Marian didn’t want to leave, but that she was ready for it.

“Looking sharp,” Bull said. “Crème de la Krem. Or maybe Krem de la--”

He’d always thought of himself as a bit of a daggy older brother; I’d be hard pressed to argue.

“I had to grow up sometime, big guy.”

“That you did, kiddo.” He was looking down the street, big fingers resting on a cracked old windowsill, the street where Marian had left only yesterday. The scar where his eye had been was almost healed now, still pink but not hot any more, starting to age. “Did she tell you who the scarecrow was?”

“She never really told me anything, Bull, you know that.”

“Wanted to forget. For a while, anyway, can’t begrudge her that. Do you want to know who I think that was?”

But I was still too bitter then, at what I thought I'd found, when instead it was what she'd given me. “Not particularly.”

He nodded. “We’ll move along soon.”


End file.
